It has heretofore been known to the art to teach reading to children and others by a number of different methods.
One heretofore known method of teaching reading is to project the words of a book or the like on a screen. This approach to teaching reading has numbers of deficiencies. Primarily, it is difficult for a student to be motivated to look at words moving even moderately rapidly across a screen. If he dislikes looking at words in books (which bear no meaning for him), he will not want to look at what are fundamentally meaningless words projected by film onto a screen.
Other long known methods of teaching reading are the so-called phonetic systems which resemble a jig-saw puzzle approach wherein the student must "sound out" a word. By the time that he has done this, he has commonly forgotten and/or lost interest in the material before him.
Other methods entrench a student in a milieu of failure. A person "used" to failure will not want to devote the patient application necessary in order to achieve success through reading methods which require long periods of time and arduous work.
Many methods simply are not enjoyable, in and of themselves. The enjoyment will come, the student is told, after he learns to read.
Months or years are required for a student to achieve mastery in reading through use of numbers of heretofore known methods. Most students today are geared for "instant results."
Perhaps the most successful of the heretofore known methods of teaching reading, although it involves significant inadequacies which, as will be shown below, are overcome by the present invention, is one in which the student is supposed to look at or scan the words in a book or the like containing written or printed words while they are simultaneously being read to the student, or audibly being reproduced from a previously recorded means, such as a record, or by a magnetic play-back unit in the case of a magnetic tape or the like, and heard and followed by said student while he supposedly looks at or scans said words and in correlated relation thereto, a technique which combines sight word recognition with phonetics and proper pronunciation. This involves, worded otherwise, visual presentation of words, as in a book or the like, accompanied by an audio or sound presentation, as a result of which comprehension and retention of the material by the student is substantially increased. This approach to the teaching of reading commonly has been implemented by the use of audio recordings, in the form of records or magnetic tapes or the like, accompanied by a book or the like which is used in conjunction with said recordings, the audio presentation serving to provide the phonetic instruction and is keyed to the book or the like written words which provide the visual presentation. This type of method of teaching reading is disclosed, for instance, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,553,851; 3,583,729 and 3,641,684. The method just described, as indicated above, is, generally speaking, moderately effective.
It possesses the advantages that students tend to enjoy "reading" from the very first session, which is achieved through a combination of the following: the student is permitted to select his own reading material and his choice, therefore, tends to correspond to his established interests; the taped voice is predesigned to read in a dramatic manner, thus vivifying the written words of the book or the like which he is "reading"; from the very first session, the student is enabled to form a mental image of the material which he is "reading," and it is this capacity which, particularly, makes reading enjoyable; the student is, generally speaking, motivated to follow the written symbols with his eyes with the result that (a) his eyes naturally learn to move in the sweeping scansion required for proper reading as his eye movements are regulated through an induced following of the recorded voice, (b) he becomes familiar with the natural cadences of language as symbolized by grammatical syntax and, thus, he learns that a comma indicates a pause, a period indicates a lowering of the voice and a slight stop, etc., and (c) through a repeated induced association of the written symbol with the voiced word, the student soon becomes capable of reading simple words and, thus, by seeing and hearing the word "was" (or any other word) read over and over again, the student soon learns to recognize it on his own.
Other advantages of the foregoing known method of teaching reading are that, by hearing words read in context, the student is enabled to comprehend the meaning of many words which he would not be able to understand if encountered individually. The student tends to have a reasonably successful reading experience from his very first session with the recorded matter which is often a unique experience for him, as many of these students have become accustomed to failure in scholarly pursuits. The teacher generally has no difficulties with discipline, as the student tends to be fascinated by and enjoys the reading sessions, his attention being concentrated on the looking-listening procedure. The student tends not to learn to practice mistakes since what he sees and hears is correct, and he doesn't keep mistaking words over and over again. Finally, the cost to the public or other group which supports the school systems is reasonable since many, if not most, modern school systems, and/or school libraries are equipped with cassette players, earphones, etc.
Despite the foregoing advantages of said last-mentioned method of teaching reading, it possesses certain significant deficiencies the nature of which will be brought out below, and which the method of the present invention effectively overcomes.
Other heretofore known teaching systems lie largely in the realm of providing mechanical and electronic equipment, intended, commonly, to be operated by the student. Apart from the matter of the complexity and high cost of various of such equipment, most of it, generally speaking, is of a character such that it is not susceptible of easy usage, particularly by young children, and, as a practical proposition, it does not lend itself to meeting in a simple, easy and inexpensive way to the teaching of reading in ordinary classroom setups which are characteristic of what is encountered in the normal classroom in the usual schools. Illustrative of such mechanical and electronic equipment arrangements are, for instance, those shown in the aforementioned U.S. Patents as well as in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,540,132; 3,579,855; 3,691,313; 3,808,720; 3,905,128 and 3,996,671.
As has been indicated above, there are significant inadequacies in the above-described method of teaching reading, which has been characterized above as being perhaps the most successful of the methods of teaching reading, namely, where the student is supposed to look at the words in a book, or is supposed to "read" the words, as they are being reproduced by an audio recording, as referred to above, keyed to the words in the book. Quite commonly, the students' attentions wander, they are diverted by other matters occurring in the class and there is no particular motivational factor which makes for the student having a special inducement to focus his attention on the scanning of the words of the book or the like with the audible sound which has been set up to correlate therewith. In short, the aforesaid known method of teaching reading does not have a motivation for the student to correlate the written and the sound words. He is able, simply, to follow the story or the like which is being read just by listening to it without looking at the words appearing in the book or the like which is before him. Indeed, if the classwork, after the audible reading has been finished, involves questions being asked of the student concerning what he has heard, he is in a position to answer such questions without even having looked at the words of the book or the like before him and, indeed, he may even have decided to concentrate on listening to the audible reading and disregard the words in the book or the like before him.
In accordance with the improved method of teaching reading pursuant to the present invention, motivational factors are incorporated so that the student has a special desire for achievement and tied in thereto are means to enable the teacher to determine whether or not the student has visually followed the audio presentation and so ascertain the progress, or lack of progress, that the individual student is making during the period of time in which he is being taught to read. Most students desire to achieve and to have that achievement concretely reflected by good grades evidenced by graded papers which reflect such achievement. The present invention provides that motivation for the students and also enables the teacher readily and simply to determine or monitor the progress of the individual students.